In recent years, the means for providing information has undergone a change from old information providing methods utilizing television and radio broadcasting systems to novel information providing methods utilizing Web pages on the Internet. In particular, based on the popularization of portable terminal devices such as a cellular phone, a user is able to access necessary information from an arbitrary location, and therefore, convenience has been greatly increased. Also, from a business side that provides commodities and services, store advertisements and guide information can be widely provided to users via Web pages. When a user goes out, the user is able to obtain a wide range of information regarding stores, which the user plans to utilize, by browsing such Web pages in advance.
Thus, when accessing information via the Internet, it is important to extract information matched with one's own requests from the great abundance of information. Therefore, the user carries out retrieval using a desired keyword by utilizing retrieval sites, and accesses a Web page on which necessary information is provided. For example, where the user goes out to have a meal out or goes out shopping, the user is able to browse Web pages of Italian food restaurants or women's clothing shops by using retrieval keywords such as “Italian food” and “Women's clothing.”
In addition, in order to efficiently provide appropriate information to individual users, various types of technologies are provided. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-296358A discloses an information distribution system, in which information showing the tastes of individual users is collected in advance, for providing information that matches with the tastes of individuals, and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-326211A discloses a manner in which the degrees of taste of respective users are stored as a profile based on situation information including an accompanying person. Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-108918A discloses a taste learning apparatus for learning the tastes of a specified user based on the behavior history of the user.
As has been disclosed in the respective patent documents described above, several proposals have already been provided, which grasp the tastes of individual users and provides appropriate information to the individual users. However, since, in either technology described above, it is difficult to accurately grasp the taste information of individual users, it is also difficult to provide information in which the tastes of users are accurately reflected.
Accordingly, the present invention has an object to provide an information providing system that is able to accurately grasp the tastes of individual users and to provide information in which the tastes of users are accurately reflected.